Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.
Ray Bradbury “Fahrenheit 451”.
A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here… Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.
Miles Harvey “The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime”
The earliest maps were ‘story’ maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
Rory MacLean
Filling in the dots on this map is not really about being accurate about where I stayed, when and which routes i took but is more to give a sense of flow to the journey I am on. One place is preceded by and precedes another … every part of the journey, whether by truck, train, boat or bike is linked to the other parts. Please don’t read this map as a static document but rather read it in tandem with the blogs and feel the route rather than ‘look it up’! It will also be changing regularly!!!! If I think of something I might add it in … when I can I will differentiate the different modes of travel … for me it’s a fluid ‘concept’ not a static statement!
Mapping Tilly and Rae –
Wide-Eyed Views 